The Revolution Meets Attitude

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See if you can pick up the subtle differences between Acclaim's ECW and WWF games.

By IGN Staff

ECW: Hardcore Revolution owes a lot to WWF Attitude. If it wasn't for Acclaim's last WWF game, Hardcore Revolution wouldn't have a wrestling engine, its create-a-wrestler feature or such a quick delivery to market. By the time Hardcore Thursday rolls around and the game is released next week, it will have been less than five months since Acclaim announced it was even doing an ECW game.

We thought we'd take a look at both ECW: Hardcore Revlution and its close relative, WWF Attitude, so that we can get a better idea of what's new and what's not. We've already shown you movies of the barbed wire match in our preview for the game, but we were also told that Hardcore Revolution would be a little faster and feature a slightly richer create-a-wrestler mode. IGN64 hopped right in and checked these out for ourselves.

Creating Hardcore

Creating a wrestler in Attitude was almost an exercise endurance rather than creativity. There had to be hundreds of thousands of possible combinations with all of the various clothing, equipment and physiological options given to us. All of that depth is back in ECW with more than a few wrinkles thrown in. In fact, we're surprised that wrinkly skin wasn't an option for skin type this time around.

You can actually give your male or female grappler scarred, bruised or welted skin this time out. This is in addition to the plain, hairy, fat or ripped options given to us in Attitude. Giving your wrestler welted skin leaves him or her with big ugly red blotches on their skin that look so gross that it would be a shame to cover them up with clothing.

In addition to nasty skin, you've got a few clothing options available in the ECW game that we didn't see in Attitude. After choosing a shirt for your wrestler, you can then add a variety of logos and some crazy overlayed patterns to their outfit. If you remember the ninja shirt from Attitude, you can take that red squiggly pattern and just apply that to whatever other shirt your guy or gal is wearing. This is a cool option if you can just avoid piling plaids and stripes and polka dots on top of each other because things can get very ugly very quickly.

The Speed of Pain

It's a tough call on which game is faster. When we first played Hardcore Revolution, it seemed to be lightning quick and responsive, but we also realized that it had been many moons since we'd played Attitude. It was possible that our perceptions would be a little warped because of the layoff from Acclaim wrestling games. A direct comparison was the only way to go.

One of the downsides to rolling out very similar versions of a wrestling game is that all of the moves are going to be the same. It's the same Snapmare and the same Samoan Drop that we've seen before. There a few moves thrown in that we haven't seen before like Reverse Fujiwara and you do get ECW specific finishers like the Wham Bam Thank You Maam and Raven's good old Evenflow DDT.

As we said a lot of the moves are the same, so it does make it a little easier to compare the overall speed of each game. As best as we can tell, Hardcore Revolution is faster but only slightly. If we had to put a number on it we'd say a good 10% faster. It's not going to blow you away, but those little motion captured grapplers will really be zipping around that ring.

From what we've seen so far of Hardcore Revolution it only does slightly more than Attitude. The total of the barbed wire match, the cool new weapons and some top quality foul language will help it out a lot. But it will eventually come down to gameplay and this is where you'll want to see a difference. We've got a pair of quick clips of each game so that you can see for yourself.

ECW is all about outrageous extremely dangerous wrestling with plenty of action outside around and through the ring. There's no way the Attitude engine can capture all of this but Acclaim seems to have gotten as "extreme" as it can with what its got.

For all things wrestling be sure to check out IGN Wrestling. Like IGN64, they know what you're into.